Barenaked Ladies Leave Fans Laughing

There was something funny about the Barenaked Ladies on Wednesday night.

No  like FUNNY, funny.

Dropping by their favorite stateside town, Canada's devout rock pranksters goofed around for more than 15,000 fans at the sold-out Palace of Auburn Hills. As Detroit fans have come to know and quite visibly love, a Barenaked Ladies concert is less a gig than a giggle.

The humor comes in an assortment of shapes and sizes: There's the Monty Python absurdism, manifested Wednesday night by the constant presence of an unnamed percussionist in a chef outfit, drolly unremarked upon by the band as if he were a perfectly normal sight. There's the racy slapstick, like the reliable riffs on edible underwear delivered throughout the show by frontmen Steve Page and Ed Robertson. There's that Gen X funnybone fave, irony, and it's painted all over the BNL carousel  the metal-god guitar hamming, the midshow drum solo (video screen disclaimer: "This is not a solo"), the barrage of incongruous pop culture references.

Mostly, though, the Barenaked Ladies' brand of humor is like the stuff you experience in your dorm at 3 in the morning, when you and your pals giggle with punchy fervor at an escalating flurry of inside jokes. It seems appropriate here: With their campus-clean look, the members of BNL are the unlikeliest of rock stars, guys so normal they make Hootie & the Blowfish look like Greenwich Village beats.

And, yes, they do play music. Wednesday's 2-hour set included a solid chunk of material from the group's new album, "Maroon," along with crowd-rousing sing-alongs from the band's past catalog. Few songs trod into transcendence; ultimately, there's something distressingly pedestrian about the bulk of the Ladies' songcraft. But there were fine moments: the punchy "Alcohol," the taut "Sell, Sell, Sell," the loping whimsy of "Jane" and "Off the Hook."

Still, a night with the Ladies is not about sobriety  in either the traditional or keg-party sense  and even the music doesn't escape the sabre of wit. That's why bassist Jim Creeggan mutated what started like a perfectly solemn classical solo into a bizarre ditty with the refrain, "I like to eat apples and bananas."

The band sounded good  three months after kicking off this tour with a show at Pine Knob, the ensemble was tight when it needed to be and playfully loose when it didn't. "Honed by the sharp stone of the road," offered Page during a freestyle battle of metaphors with Robertson.

As with any kitchen-sink approach, elements of the band's presentation fall flat. In particular, the funky-nerd schtick  a series of raps and dance steps continually called upon by Page and Robertson  are the sorts of things delivered with far subtler skill by someone like Beck.